Biography

Kristen von Hoffmann founded Greenfox Schools in March 2008. Now, as a team of eight people, Greenfox partners with environmental service and supply companies to provide schools with cutting edge programs, products, and technology facilitating the green process at a school from start to finish. Program implementation is supplemented with sustainability education that Kristen has developed, including curriculum and the Greenfox Kids Magazine.

Kristen bases her company on the Greenfox5: a strategy that defines the five main functional points of optimization for any building as Energy, Waste Disposal, Food, Products, and Greenspace. Kristen first developed this strategy as an undergraduate at Yale University, where she played an integral role in the start-up of the Yale Sustainable Food Project (YSFP), a university undertaking and national model for sustainability education that includes a college farm, a sustainable dining hall program, university composting, expanded food and agriculture curriculum, community education, and partnership with the renowned Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Kristen received a Sudler Creative Arts Scholarship from the University in 2004 to document a semester on the YSFP’s organic farm through photography, interviews, and policy analysis.

Kristen graduated from Yale in 2006 with a B.A. in English and also studied conservation biology, international relations, and agricultural policy. In 2003, she received a Community Life Grant from the University’s Kidd Foundation to pursue an independent thesis researching Hope VI housing projects in New Haven under Vincent Scully. Kristen was also a Yale-in-London scholar and team winner of the simulated “Redevelopment of East Harlem Competition” in Alexander Garvin’s course “Study of the City,” in 2004.

Currently, Kristen is President of Greenfox Schools in Cambridge, MA, and teaches elementary school part-time. Kristen is on the K-12 Sector Team for the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development. She is also a Board Director for the Boston non-profit ExCL, Extras for Creative Learning. The oldest of three daughters, she was raised in Montclair, New Jersey, where she attended the Montclair Cooperative School and Montclair Public Schools.

Kristen von Hoffmann at the United States Green Building Council Educator's Summit, November 2008.